“Our shopping chatbot was developed using Dialogflow to offer a new type of shopping experience through a messaging interface, with responses continually being improved through machine learning. Going forward, we’re also looking to expand the functionality to include voice recognition and multiple languages.”
— Shinya Matsuyama, Director of Global Digital Commerce, Uniqlo
“Dialogflow is by far the best platform for text-based conversational chatbots. With it, we derive all the benefits of machine learning without restrictions on the frontend. Through our chatbot, we are now closing over 13,000 sales totaling a premium of nearly $2 million (USD) every month and growing at a 30% month-over-month rate.”
— Ashish Gupta, CTO & CPO, Policybazaar.com
"It was essential for us to have order sequence in our app logic, and with Cloud Spanner, it’s built in. When we started looking at GCP, we quickly identified Cloud Spanner as the solution, as it provided relational semantics and incredible scalability within a managed service. We hadn’t found a Cloud Spanner-like product in other clouds. We ran a successful POC and plan to move several massive services to Cloud Spanner. We look forward to Multi-Region configurations, as they give us the ability to expand globally and reduce latencies for customers on the other side of the world"
— Manoj Goyal, Marketo Chief Product Officer
"At our size, problems such as scalability and reliability don't have a simple answer, Cloud Spanner is a transformational technology choice for us. It will give us a regionally distributed database storage layer for our customers’ data that can scale as we continue to grow. Our whole technology team is excited to bring this into production in the coming months."
— Ben McCormack, Evernote Vice President of Operations
“We want to move from our current on-prem per-customer deployment model to the cloud to improve performance and reliability, which is extremely important to us and our customers. With Cloud Spanner, we can process ten times more transactions per second (using a current benchmark of 55k transactions per second), allowing us to better serve customers, with a dramatically reduced total cost of ownership."
— Danielle Royston, CEO, Redknee
Android runs on billions of devices, from high-end phones to airplane seatbacks. The Android OS manages resources aggressively to perform well on this huge range of devices, and sometimes that can make building robust apps complicated. To make it easier, we launched a preview of Architecture Components at Google I/O to provide guidance on app architecture, with libraries for common tasks like lifecycle management and data persistence. Together, these foundational components make it possible to write modular apps with less boilerplate code, so developers can focus on innovating instead of reinventing the wheel - and we hope to keep building on this foundation in the future.
Today we're happy to announce that the Room and Lifecycle Architecture Components libraries have reached 1.0 stable. These APIs are ready for production apps and libraries, and are our recommendation for developers looking for help with app architecture and local storage (although they're only recommended, not required.) Lifecycles are now also integrated with the Support Library, so you can use them with standard classes like AppCompatActivity.
Although we're declaring them stable today, the beta components are already used in apps that together, have billions of installs. Top developers, like Zappos, have been able to spend more time on what's important thanks to Architecture Components:
We've also started to use LiveData which hooks directly into the Activity lifecycle. We use it to retrieve and display network data and no longer have to concern ourselves with network call subscription management. - David Henry, Android Software Engineer, Zappos
Architecture Components provide a simple, flexible and practical approach that frees developers from some common problems so they can focus on building great experiences. This is based on core building blocks tied together by guidance on app architecture.
Every Android developer has to deal with the operating system starting, stopping and destroying their Activities. That means managing the state of components - such as observables used to update UI - as you move through the lifecycle. Lifecycles enables the creation of lifecycle-aware components that manage their own lifecycles, reducing the possibility of leaks or crashes. The Lifecycle library is the foundation for other Architecture Components like LiveData.
LiveData is a lifecycle-aware observable that holds data and provides updates. Your UI code subscribes to changes and provides LiveData a reference to its Lifecycle. Because LiveData is lifecycle-aware, it provides updates when its Lifecycle is started or resumed, but stops providing updates when the LifecycleOwner is destroyed. LiveData is a simple way to build reactive UIs that are safer and more performant.
ViewModel separates ownership of view data and logic from lifecycle-bound entities like Activities and Fragments. A ViewModel is retained until its associated Activity or Fragment is disposed of forever - that means view data survives events like a Fragment being recreated due to rotation. ViewModels not only eliminate common lifecycle issues, they help build UIs that are more modular and easier to test.
Nearly all apps need to store data locally. While Android has bundled SQLite with the platform since version 1, using it directly can be painful. Room is a simple object-mapping layer that provides the full power of SQlite with less boilerplate. Features like compile-time query verification and built-in migration make it easier to build a robust persistence layer, while integration with LiveData lets Room provide database-backed, lifecycle-aware observables. Room blends of simplicity, power and robustness for managing local storage, and we hope you give it a try.
Last but not least, we created a Guide to App Architecture that provides core principles applicable to all developers, and specific guidance on using Architecture Components together. Because we've heard from you that clear and consistent guidance is important, today we're updating developer documentation to point to Architecture Components where appropriate. We also have a rich set of videos, codelabs and sample apps available at the Architecture Components site, with more to come.
Although the first set of Architecture Components is now stable, we know there's more work to do. Over the last few months, we've listened to your feedback and made improvements. We also recently launched a new Architecture Component, PagedList, to alpha, in response to your feedback that handling large datasets with RecyclerView is too difficult. This is just the beginning - we have more major components under development that we're looking to announce in the upcoming months.
Our hope with Architecture Components is to free developers to focus on providing unique new experiences for mobile devices. We're glad we can finally announce them as stable for production use. We'd like to thank the community, which has given such great feedback along the way, and we look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments of this post. Finally, for those of you who've been waiting for this stable launch, get started today.
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"By providing direct access to Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect, we are helping enterprises leverage Google’s network — the largest in the world — and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategies globally. Dedicated Interconnect offered in collaboration with Equinix enables customers to easily build the cloud of their choice with dedicated, low-latency connections and SLAs that enterprise customers have come to expect from hybrid cloud architectures."
— Ryan Mallory, Vice President, Global Solutions Enablement, Equinix
Google Cloud DLP API enables our security solutions to scan and classify documents and images from multiple cloud data stores and email sources. This allows us to offer our customers critical security features, such as classification and redaction, which are important for managing data and mitigating risk. Google’s intelligent DLP service enables us to differentiate our offerings and grow our business by delivering high quality results to our customers.
— Sateesh Narahari, VP of Products, Managed Methods
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| With the DLP API, you can classify and mask sensitive elements in both structured data and unstructured data. |
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| The DLP API identifies and redacts a name, social security number, telephone number and email address |
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| With the DLP API, you can prevent users from seeing sensitive data in real-time |